Key considerations for your next development job

As a developer, your basic job is to create things. Since the world needs software in every industry you might think that one is the same as the next, and you’d be shamefully wrong. Outside of the obvious questions you should ask yourself when looking for your next gig – how sharp are the coworkers, how good is the tech, how hard are the problems, how good are the tools – you should also ask: “Who are we working for?” It turns out that who you produce for can more directly impact how much you like your job than you might think.

Internal* vs. External client

Internal clients don’t matter as much as external ones. Yeah I said it, wanna fight about it? Working for a bank on their internal accounting software is not the same as working on banking software that is sold to banks. Period, close bracket, EOF. The reason for this is that one is a profit center with real financial pressure, and the other is a cost center, with pressure to simply exist cheaply. A profit center has direct competitors that you sometimes have to react to, but a cost center rarely implements new product due to hearing that an internal customer at another company is happy. The internal vs. external switch plays itself out in multiple subtle ways:

Rate of Change

A profit center tries multiple things, watches competitors to match features, explores new lines of business, etc. A cost center does not take much risk, and thus is more setup for small improvement or the support of company growth.

Rate of spending

Another way this plays out is in lack of budget flexibility – since a cost center is under pressure to lower costs their budgets are smaller and less innovative. The type of managers that run these organizations are the special type of demon that is good at finding ways to save money – like on hardware or crappy coffee.

Rate of Respect

In a profit center the business leaders interact with the technical leaders and producers enough that they begin to understand their importance. Over time a mutual respect grows and is a healthy team behavior. In a cost center at times the cost center is in a servant position and the IT functions are not held in the same level of respect.

Producer vs. Maintainer

There is another subtle difference in “software developers” at times that can play out in affecting you position. Some people build tools and processes and some people build deliverable product. In the software realm the tools can include continuous integration modules, deployment tools, operational helper tools, code generators, etc. Product includes things that directly sell outside your organization. If you are a developer working on the toolset *primarily* you are secondary to those working on the end product – you are in effect serving an internal customer.

Deadline driven vs Shame-driven

When we interview someone we always ask how the end game of projects work – “Do you work off of deadlines?”, “Who sets these deadlines?”. Many internal customers have false deadlines because there is no competition – are they going to go use another internal accounting department? The same fire does not always exist in those working in internally-facing companies. Just because your coworkers are smart this doesn’t mean they have any hustle.

Industry and Economy

The industry that you are building solutions for can matter because the level of tolerated innovation differs across industries and product categories. My first full-time programming job was working on an audio-dispatching call center product that was sold to air traffic controllers and 911 call centers. The sales cycle for this product was very different than other industries – if a client saw a demo and a single thing went wrong they would typically say: “We will reevaluate changing our product in 5 years, get back to us then”. This is obviously different than the change cycle for a web-based project management tool that might receive changes every two weeks.

Customer distance

How “close” you are to the customer matters as well whether that customer is internal or external. While only some developers are interested in directly speaking to customers, the dev team’s distance to the customer can affect whether or not what they are building matters. As a producer you should care very deeply about whether you are building the right thing.

* Internal clients means full-time – if you are working on a project for an internal client the effects are more minor. Most of what is mentioned above is when you wake up everyday to a world of internal client demands only.